After Last Night

Republican Karen Handel handily handled Democratic manchild Jon Ossoff in the special election to fill Georgia’s Sixth District congressional seat last night. The race was expected to be a cliffhanger. We were told that we wouldn’t know the outcome until the early morning hours today. By 10:00 p.m., however, it was clear that Handel would prevail. With 100 percent of the votes tabulated, Handel won by about four points or 10,000 votes (out of a total of about 260,000).

The Hollywood/San Francisco crowd invested big time in Ossoff. For the California left, it was the night that the lights went out in Georgia. Roger Simon rightly declares Hollywood a YUUUGE loser last night.

The lynch mob media (as Senator Cotton calls it) also heavily invested in the race — as one could see from the looks of the crew commenting last night on CNN. You didn’t even have to turn up the volume to figure out what was happening. How great is this?

Until Ossoff lost, of course, this may have been the most important congressional race ever. It was to be an omen. It would be a portent. Now we’re back in the USSR. Mary Katharine Ham put it this way on Twitter last night:

Washington Examiner politics editor Jim Antle let loose with a steady stream of punning tweets with musical themes last night. When Handel was declared the winner he observed that it would take a while before we knew which factor was Handel’s messiah.

Ossoff raised $23.5 million to Handel’s $4.5 million. Outside Republican campaign funds partially redressed the balance. The New York Times breaks down the numbers here.

PJ Media’s Tyler O’Neil considers the cash in an excellent post here. “Ossoff’s huge war chest might have hurt him. In the last two months, the Democrat reported receiving nine times more donations from California than from Georgia. In the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area alone, Ossoff reported receiving 3,063 donations, nearly four times the Georgia total of 808 gifts.”

From a distance, it seemed to me that Handel probably fit the district a bit better than Ossoff. For one thing, she actually lived there. Ossoff lived outside the district with his girlfriend. At one time he lived in the district. He could remember his old address there.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher covered the race in the spirit of Andrew Breitbart. He documented his two-hour trek from Ossoff’s house to the Sixth District. He was rewarded for his efforts with his exclusion from an Ossoff campaign event on the night before the election.

In the end the California contributions may have boomeranged. Handel pounded on the Pelosi factor that an Ossoff victory would enhance. O’Neil notes: “Most of the Handel ads attacking Ossoff tied the Democrat to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It appears that that message worked.”